arteles_catalogue_2014

IN THE RESIDENCY
September-October 2014
“Believing in nothing is like walking
around freshly skinned.”
CARA COLE
Canada
caraleacole@hotmail.com // www.caracoleart.com
Once I set my heart on a thing, I bite down, and the world narrows
to that bright point. The dying animal pounds and thrashes and
moans as life and death mingle in the body. This mingling is visible
and insubstantial as a rainbow, as smoke. The animal collapses,
shivers and stills. Live flesh, responsive, intelligent flesh has
become dead meat. Inert matter. Watching this is like being ripped
apart and put back together. I wipe my face and look at my stained
hands. I’ve been dressed in blood.
For fifteen years I have researched and documented blood sacrifice
rituals throughout the globe. I am often asked why I choose to
focus my photography and my first novel on such seemingly grim
subject matter. There are anthropological reasons. The rituals
themselves are changing. They will die. But much of what drives
me is personal. Participating in these extraordinary ceremonies
count among my most profound encounters with mortality. The
sacrifice rituals are intoxicating. I have been swept into the river of
religious transportment.
And I have been hurled out of that river. I admit to conflicting
desires. I wish I could do more than photograph, do more than
place my hands in those secret rich places where memory and
desire—a life—dwelled. I examine the interiors of bodies and wish
I could perform my own miracles upon the flesh. I wish I could
reverse the tide of time and bring the dead back to life, to make
blood rush into the body instead of out, to inflate collapsed lungs
with fresh breath, to seal gaping wounds neat and invisible, as
though they were never there at all.